Friday, July 22, 2016

Among other projects, I am currently working on a book featuring Hemingway’s
faith journey. I recently had the privilege of speaking at the Hemingway
Society conference in Oak Park, Illinois where he was born and grew up. Below are the text of my pre-delivery remarks. —
Mary Claire Kendall

I am the
author of Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends, featuring an all-star
twelve, including Hemingway’s good friend Gary Cooper.

It’s wonderful
to be part of this distinguished panel about Hemingway’s Religious Quest” on
this, the first day of The Hemingway Society’s biennual conference in
Hemingway’s hometown of Oak Park.

Five
summers ago, no sooner had I finished writing an article about Cooper and his
faith journey, than Hemingway was splashing into the news. It was the 50th anniversary
of his death. Knowing how close Hemingway and Cooper were and that they died
just weeks apart—Coop on May 13—I began to dig deeper into Hemingway’s life.

That
August, I began to read The Sun Also Rises, a paperback copy of which I
happened to buy for a dollar years earlier at the now-defunct Vassar Book Fair
in Washington, DC. I was coming off a
very stressful year after my own Hollywood hazing and each night, feeling totally
wired, something amazing happened. Within fifteen minutes or so of reading this
literary masterpiece, I was fast asleep. His writing was just so beautiful and
calming. There was so much depth beneath the tip of that iceberg!

On the
afternoon of Friday, September 9, as my quest to understand this legendary
writer intensified, I felt, somewhat mystically, as if Hemingway was saying to
me, “It’s about time.”

A few
days later, on Tuesday, September 12, coincidentally the Feast of the Name of
Mary, I reached out to Charles Scribner as I tried to glean more important
pieces in the puzzle of his life and he told me, “Hemingway called himself a
Catholic [having been baptized by a Catholic priest in Italy during WWI]…”

By
November 2011, my friend Fr. C. John McCloskey, known as “the convert maker,”
having brought a who’s who to the Catholic Church, introduced me to his friend Redd
Griffin of Oak Park, who had studied Hemingway’s spirituality for 25 years. His
knowledge was encyclopedic. Our conversation that first Sunday before
Thanksgiving 2011 went on for four hours as I furiously scribbled away.

I was
hooked and soon, instead of an article, I was working on a book proposal. To my shock, Redd would live just 12 more
months—suddenly dying, almost a year to the day after our first phone seminar.

He had
guided me well that year as I climbed Mount Hemingway. That summer I
interviewed Hemingway’s son Patrick for a Forbes article published on
Hemingway’s birthday, titled “Hemingway on Hemingway and Hollywood.”

And, that
November, just before Redd died, I fortuitously reached out to H.R. Stoneback seeking
guidance as I continued to write my proposal. On July 8, 2013, I wrapped back
around to what Charlie Scribner had told me, and wrote another Forbes piece,
this one titled “Hemingway Transformed, 95 Years Later.”

Then, “Oasis”
intervened as well as life tragedy, namely the sudden death of my beloved
mother Claire. But, in the summer of 2015,
out of the blue, I heard from “Stoney” on August 11, the Feast of St. Claire,
and eve of my mother’s birthday, no less, asking if I had found a publisher and
would I like to speak at this conference?
A good omen, I thought.

So,
without further adieu, I give you, “Hemingway Transformed, 98 Years
Later.”

***

Hemingway Transformed,

98 Years Later

By Mary
Claire Kendall

In the
summer of 1918, as World War I was entering its final bloody stages, Ernest
Hemingway, like most American youth, answered the call to serve in this “war to
end all wars.” Then, as now, the same sectarian and religious rivalries
convulsed the world.

Ernest Hemingway in Milan, 1918

Within
weeks, Hemingway was seriously wounded and nearly died. The experience would
transform him into not only a great writer but a man of great faith. The former
we know all too well—embodied in such epic works as A Farewell to Arms,
made into an Oscar-winning film starring Gary
Cooper. The latter we know little of.

That the
underlying theme of his writing—and his life—is “sanctity,” according to
Hemingway scholar H.R. Stoneback, has everything to do with what happened in
the heat of battle in Fossalta, Italy along the Piave River, and its immediate
aftermath, 98 years ago this month.

***

Given
defective eyesight, the Army rejected Hemingway. So, he joined the American
Red Cross Ambulance Corps and, on May 23, 1918, just 18, set sail for Europe
from New York with his fellow enlistees.

After
crossing the Atlantic, it was “Paris and red tape,” he wrote his friend, second
lieutenant Henry Villard, followed by “temporary duty in Milano”—including the
“shock” his first day while retrieving the dead from a munitions factory
explosion that, as he wrote in Death in the Afternoon (1932),
“a good number of these (dead)… were women.”

Afterwards
he “strolled through the Galleria and into the vast dim cathedral,” he wrote
Villard, and arrived in Schio, home of the Ambulance Corps, on June 10,
1918.

But Hemingway
found Schio insufferably boring and soon managed to finagle an assignment
running one of the “rolling canteens” the American Red Cross established, among
a network of canteens, that got him as close to the front lines as possible.
He arrived at his new assignment on June 24, 1918, joined by his close
friend Bill Horne.

As the
second lieutenant in his section, Hemingway was allowed to eat in the mess hall
with the Italian officers. It was there that he met Don Giuseppe Bianchi, a
young priest from the Abruzzi region near Florence. Just like the priest
in A Farewell to Arms, Don Bianchi, wrote Carlos Baker in Hemingway:
A Life Story, “wore a cross in dark red velvet above the left-hand pocket of
his tunic” and, also like the priest in the novel vis-à-vis Lt. Frederic
Henry, played by Cooper, “quickly befriended Ernest who treated him with
sympathy and respect.”

At the
end of June, Ernest’s rolling canteen was far from operational, leaving him to
deliver chocolates and cigarettes on foot.

He made
quite an impression. As his friend Ted Brumback (“Brummy”) wrote Ernest’s
family, as quoted in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1907-1922, edited by
Sandra Spanier and Robert Trogdon, “The Italians in the trenches got to know
his smiling face and were always asking for their ‘giovane Americano.’” While
Hemingway was enjoying himself capitally, Horne, Baker wrote, found “(t)he
combination of inaction, mosquitoes, and gnawing silkworms” oppressive,
prompting him to return to Schio on July 1st.

A week
later, Horne heard the news that, as Baker wrote, “(a)round midnight on July 8thin
a forward listening post on the west bank of the river near Fossalta, Ernest
had been severely wounded.”

The
midnight mortar, Brummy wrote, “hit within a few feet of Ernest while he was
giving out chocolate. The concussion of the explosion knocked him unconscious
and buried him with earth.” The Italian closer to the shell, Brummy
continued, was killed and “another, standing a few feet away, had both legs
blown off.” Ernest was heroic in saving a badly wounded third Italian:
“(T)his one Ernest, after he had regained consciousness, picked up on his back
and carried to the first aid dug-out. He says he does not remember how he got
there nor that he had carried a man until the next day when an Italian officer
told him about it” and said they had voted to give him the valor medal.

Years
later, Hemingway wrote in his usual cryptic style in a letter to Thomas Welsh,
father of his fourth wife, Mary, as Stoneback reported in “Hemingway’s
Catholicism and the Biographies,” that “In first war… really scared after
wounded and very devout at the end.”

In
typical Hemingway fashion, he kept this secret about his fervent faith to
himself when writing to his family on August 18, 1918, from the American Red
Cross Hospital in Milan. But, make no mistake, in spite of what his various
biographers have previously written, Hemingway was a changed man. As Stoneback
writes:

…
(Hemingway biographer Jeffrey) Meyers (wrote that)… “A Florentine priest, Don
Giuseppe Bianchi, passed by the wounded men, murmuring holy
words and anointing them. There was no need for the priest to give Hemingway extreme
unction; he was not in mortal danger and was recovering from his wounds.
Bianchi’s perfunctory ceremony was not (as Hemingway later conveniently claimed)
a formal baptism into the Catholic Church.” (Hemingway: A Biography, by Jeffrey
Meyers, p. 32; emphasis added). Aside from the patronizing tone of this
passage… Meyers seems confused about the sacraments. If the priest did
“anoint” Hemingway, what else could the sacrament have been but extreme
unction? It is also, most likely, under battlefield circumstances, that
obtained, that the priest would first speak the brief Trinitarian words of
“conditional Baptism” and then administered the viaticum, the Holy Communion
given to those in danger of death…

Hemingway—a
bloody mess, with over 200 pieces of shrapnel, along with bullets, lodged in
his legs, knees and feet—was holding on for dear life in that schoolhouse,
where he received morphine and antitetanus and a Catholic
“anointing.” That anointing, he later boasted, in his January 2, 1926 response
to a letter from Ernest Walsh—an expatriate American poet and co-editor of the
small but influential Paris magazine This Quarter, where Hemingway’s
fiction was first published—made him a “super-catholic.” In this same letter,
which Michael Reynolds included in Hemingway: The Paris Years, he
wrote:

If I am
anything I am a Catholic. Had extreme unction administered to me as such
in July 1918 and recovered… It is most certainly the most comfortable religion
for anyone soldiering. Am not what is called a “good” Catholic… But cannot
imagine taking any other religious seriously.

He was
next transported to a field hospital for five days after which the Army
transported him to the train for the trip to Milan and the American Red Cross
Hospital, where he met and fell in love with Agnes Von Kurowsky, providing the
romantic basis for A Farewell to Arms. Agnes, Stoneback wrote,
remembered Hemingway asking her to go to Mass with him in Milan at the
Cathedral he had visited on day one.

“To
understand Hemingway’s writing,” his sister Madeleine (“Sunny”) always said, as
told to me by Redd Griffin, “you need to understand his spirituality.” And,
to understand Hemingway’s spirituality, you need to understand his Catholicism,
catalyzed by that wounding so many Julys ago, on that battlefield in Italy,
where soldiers were trying to settle, once again, with weapons, intractable
sectarian and religious differences.

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About Me

Mary Claire Kendall is a writer and producer. Her book, "Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends," was published in 2015 in the United States and in Spain in 2016 under the title "También Dios pasa por Hollywood." @maryclairerose https://www.linkedin.com/in/maryclairekendall/